Cheboygan Area Schools is taking a preemptive step in the future of education, announcing plans for a virtual school that will begin serving students later in January.

“We’ve been discussing a virtual school and how it would work for a while now,” said CAS Superintendent Mark Dombroski. “The board has approved it for grades 6-12.”

The district has contracted ATS Educational Consulting Services to run the program, which should be operational by late January. ATS will provide the curriculum and monitoring for the virtual school, which will be titles Cheboygan Area Virtual School.

“It will be its own entity that we’re adding to the district,” explained Dombroski. “Test scores and things like that won’t reflect on the other school buildings.”

The goal for CAS officials is to ultimately increase enrollment and offer more opportunities to a broader range of students. District officials are targeting students in Cheboygan County and the counties surrounding it.

“We think this is a really good opportunity for us,” said Dombroski. “If we didn’t do this, someone else would. I’m guessing there are 80-100 homeschooled students right here that could take advantage of this. If we got 100 more students, that’s $200,000 more for the district.”

CAS gets roughly $7,000 per full-time student enrolled. The reason the district would only net an additional $200,000 is the amount that would have to be paid to ATS.

ATS will get a portion of funding for the virtual school students. This is well worth the investment, according to Dombroski.

“They’re handling pretty much everything,” he said. “We have to hire a mentor teacher to touch base with the students once per week and to administer state tests.”

The students who enroll and ultimately graduate from Cheboygan’s virtual school will receive a diploma that will be equally valuable, but labeled differently than those of Cheboygan Area High School graduates.

“It will say Cheboygan Virtual High School right on the diploma,” said Dombroski.

More details on this program will be released in the coming weeks as the district prepares its launch.